UNITED! (clap clap clap) UNITED! (clap clap clap)

In advance of Saturday’s massively enormous match against Liverpool, I’ve decided to share some of my favorite Manchester United songs. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to sing them with a large crowd tomorrow morning because my self-imposed ban continues until United loses a match that matters (they haven’t since the last time I was there in November), but I will be singing them to myself while watching on the computer.

We are just one of those teams that you see now and then
We often score six but we seldom score ten.
We’ll beat them at home and we’ll beat them away.
We’ll kill any bastards that get in our way
We are the pride of Old Europe
The c*ck of the North
We hate the Scousers, the Cockneys of course (AND LEEDS)
We are United without any doubt
Cause we are the Manchester Boys
La La La La La (mini mosh pit happens here too)

AN-DER-SON-SON-SON
He’s better than Kleberson
An-der-son-son-son
He’s our midfield magician
To the left
To the right
To the samba beat tonight
He is class
With the brass
And he SH*TS on Fabregasss-AN-DER (and repeat)

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA (everyone holding up their pints)
Drink A Drink A Drink
To Eric the King the King the King
He’s the leader of our football team
He’s the greatest
Center forward
That the world
Has ever seen

My old man
Said be a City fan,
And I said
Bollocks you're a c*nt (you're a c*nt)
I'd rather shag a bucket with a big hole in it
Than be a City fan for just one minute
With hatchets
And hammers
Stanley-knives and spanners
We'll show those city bastards how to fight (how to fight)
Oh I'd rather shag a bucket with a big hole in it
Than be a city fan ... ALL TOGETHER NOW (and repeat)

Oh Keano’s f*ckin magic
He wears a magic hat
And when he saw United
He said I’ll fancy that
He didn’t sign for Arsenal
Or Blackburn cuz they're sh*te
He signed for Man United
Cuz they’re f*ckin dynamite
DYNAMITE

Follow, follow, follow
Cuz United are going to Moscow (yeah I know it doesn’t rhyme, sue me we make it rhyme)
There will be dozens of Reds
And we’ll be pissed of our heads
Because United are going to Moscow (… and repeat)

And my personal favorite ...

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me
An Eric Cantona
On the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me
Two Cantonas
And an Eric Cantona
On the third day of Christmas my true love gave to me
Three Cantonas
Two Cantonas
And an Eric Cantona

And we finish the whole song. By the time it's over, most of us need oxygen. And that's part of the reason why soccer is one of my favorite sports to watch. COME ON YOU REDS!!!!

Everyone's Job Sucks ... sometimes

My friends and I were talking over e-mail about Latrell Sprewell the other day.

Because that's what guys do when they're bored at work. Even though none of us particularly like basketball, we spent a good 20-30 minutes discussing a guy who hasn't played for four years. He's an interesting story, and it led to some thoughts about employment.

After choking his coach and getting suspended for a good portion of a year, Sprewell came back and was such a solid player that the Knicks gave him a 5 year, $62.5 million contract. And NBA contracts are guaranteed, so once he signed it, he knew he was going to no doubt get that much money in his pocket. If that were me, I'd like to think I would meet some sort of financial advisor the next day and make sure that I was set up so that if I never earned another dollar again, me and my family would be fine. Apparently Spree didn't work that way, because when the contract was up and his skills had somewhat diminished, he turned down a 3 year, $21 million contract and said "I gotta feed my family."

Either that's a big family, or Latrell Sprewell is a jackass. Anyway, long story short, Sprewell continued to turn down less and less money and is now completely out of the league and possibly close to bankruptcy. As we're all talking about this one of my friends sent an e-mail that said "How could anyone turn down 1 million dollars to play BASKETBALL?"

I understand the idea of what he was saying, but my first thought was to kind of want to defend the guy. Latrell Sprewell can't be defended, but it kind of led me to the idea that every job sucks, and money alone doesn't fix that. Even if your job is to play basketball, sometimes that has to suck. Maybe your teammate is a dick, or your coach is annoying. Whatever it is, every job has to suck ... sometimes, and if somebody told me I'd have to work just as hard to get paid less than 10% of what I was making, even if that was still a million bucks I might tell everybody to screw off too.

There just isn't a perfect job out there. Some of us are happier than others, but nothing is perfect. I have a friend who got a job working for the company that makes those touch screen cash registers that you see in bars and restaurants all over the place now. Now he's moved up and is more on the design/business development side. But when he first started, his job was to travel around the country (and the world) teaching bartenders and restaurant managers how to use the touch screens. He'd go meet people, spend some time on a tutorial and then drink with the employees. His job was not too far from partying professionally. But even this job had to suck sometimes. Not every bartender would necessarily be cool. Or maybe he just wouldn't be in the mood for travelling but had to spend 3-4 days in a hotel. I guess my point is, whatever it is, don't assume that somebody else has an awesome job they could never complain about. Because there's always something.

What sucks about my job? Getting to work at 8am for starters (although that should be done in a couple of weeks). Needing to document where I am at pretty much all times (my phone basically acts like a punch card clock) is taking a while to get used to also. But overall, it's not that bad. I work with cool people at a good company and I'm a quick train ride back to NYC whenever I want.

Speaking of that, I don't care if you've never heard of any of their songs, go see Dropkick Murphys if ever given the chance. Just do it.

And there's the rub

I've always really liked this phrase, but I only just learned it comes from Hamlet (some movie I watched recently explained it). I've read most of Shakespeare, and I've even seen this movie (Gary Oldman + Tim Roth = goodness). But the classics are not really my thing. I'm currently reading this book, and probably will be until the end of eternity because it's so damn long.

Anyway, back to the rub. The rub is always there, nothing is ever perfect, we all know this. You can meet what seems to be a great girl, everything is going well, and then she lights a cigarette (I don't know how many people cannot stand smoking, but I'm one of them). Or maybe she turns out to be completely insane. Or ... I could on about this particular subject for days, and that could get depressing.

Or maybe you just start a new job, and everything is going great with the people and the work but then you get stuck on a team that needs to illustrate the company's "core values" on a bulletin board and to make it worse, get stuck in office politics along the way (the preceding is not a plot for The Office, it just happened to me and will be explained further soon). The point is, no matter where you are and what is going on, there's always something. The negative people focus on the bad stuff and forget about all the good things going on. The positive people accept that those little annoyances are part of life and aren't worth obsessing over. I try to be positive, but sometimes you just can't help it. Exhibit A: My first trip to my new gym.

I don't expect much out of a gym. Give mean a decent selection of machines and free weights and not too many people so I don't have to wait, and everything else is no big deal. Or so I thought. When I started the new job one of my first goals was to find a gym to join. The gym I belonged to during my last Jersey stint is a little too pricey for me right now and relatively far away from work so it wasn't a great option. Within the first week of the new job, however, I found out that not only is there a gym right across the street, but the company subsidizes memberships. This is perfect. I go visit about a week later. At about 6:15 on a Tuesday night, the place is dead. Awesome. They have all sorts of machines and free weights and treadmills, etc. Super Bonus. The price is about half of what I would be paying at the other gym. I'm fully expecting the bathrooms to be staffed with unicorns at this point. Nothing could go wrong ...

Until I showed up today and actually signed up. Still not too busy. Still plenty of equipment. Still cheap. But then I finished my workout and went to the locker room to shower. I don't always find showering at the gym completely necessary, but I had gotten used to it in the NYC. Well here I walk towards the showers, when we get the rub. Showers suggest plural, multiple showering spaces. This shower had many shower heads, but only one room where 8-10 people could shower at once ... together.

If somebody wants to say I'm not comfortable in my manhood, fine, whatever. But I'm not 15 anymore and this isn't high school gym class (see the Freaks and Geeks episode where the nerdy kids don't want to shower). But even if it were high school gym class, my high school gym class was never full of 70+ year old retirees who just played tennis for an hour.

So there's the rub. I'm going to leave the gym not smelling too good for the foreseeable future. And it doesn't just hurt me, it hurts everyone who has to be around me until I get myself cleaned up. Hopefully sometime soon membership will get increase to the point that I'm not expected to shower like I have to run to History class right after I'm done with dodgeball.